Biography
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. As the English Department Faculty Fellow at Niagara University, she teaches courses on academic writing, creative writing, contemporary writers, and literary publishing. Her interests include poetry and poetics, linguistics and creative translation, book arts and print culture, and alternative arts and publishing communities.
Rachelle earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems and essays on poetry have appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and other outlets online and in print, including as a limited-edition broadside by the San Francisco-based small press Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag, the creator and lead instructor of the independent poetry school Beauty School, the poetry editor of the arts and culture magazine Traffic East, and an editorial advisor to the small publisher Foundlings Press.
Rachelle began her teaching career in Madrid, Spain and has taught students of all ages across a variety of learning environments—higher education institutions, nonprofit arts organizations, independent creative writing programs, and primary and secondary schools—in the 10+ years since. She brings her DIY ethos and passion for community arts to a pedagogical approach that favors process and play: experimentation, investigation, collaboration, and total immersion.
Current Projects
Rachelle is currently at work on her third book, Audiobiography, a work of poetry set in Niagara Falls, New York. Following in the tradition of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior, and Peter Gizzi’s The Outernationale, the project leverages the intimacy of the lyric alongside documentary’s civic concern to contend with her hometown’s twin legacies of invention and corruption and uncover the resemblances between person and place. Rachelle received a 2024 Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to kickstart the development of Audiobiography and recently presented from the work-in-progress at the opening reception of Love Canal, a new series of paintings by the visual artist Dana Murray Tyrrell.
Teaching
- WRT 100: Writing and Rhetoric
- ENG/WRT 221: Creative Writing
- ENG/WRT 321: Poetry Writing
- ENG 341: Editing and Collaboration
Education
- MFA in Poetry, University of Massachusetts–Amherst
- BA in English (minor in Philosophy), University at Buffalo